Mind Over Platter

I guess I don't so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old. ~Benjamin Franklin

My idea of a middle-aged spread used to be 40 acres in Wyoming. Not any more. It's not like I register on the richter scale everytime I plop out of bed, but let's just say I could stand to lose a few... um, dozen. It's time to diet, or better yet, change my diet, and finally come to grips with the fact that I'm no longer 20 years old, when I could lose weight just sitting on the couch for an extended period.

I have two major obstacles to overcome: pizza and subs. This is a significant challenge. I live in the "Bread Belt", on the East Coast of the US, where pushers deal mouth-watering, cheese-and-meat-laden, crusty breads on practically every corner. The cheesesteaks in Philadelphia, for example, are crack for the palette, and there's been many an occasion when I passed out on a park bench after taking one too many hits. There are plenty of placebos for sure - the chains manage to survive here, just like everywhere, on speedy service and mass advertising - but the natives know the good stuff hides in scruffy joints run by people with foreign accents - Italians, Greeks, or anyone from Jersey. Trying to give this up would be like living in the Bible Belt and trying to give up church. Maybe I can track down a carbohydrate treatment center, where I can wean myself down to a mere slice or two of New York pizza. Who am I kidding... this is going to have to be cold turkey (which makes a killer sub around these parts, by the way).

I'm not entirely new to the rigors of being on a diet, though. I did it once back in 6th grade, along with a raft of oversized classmates who were trying to make a weight limit to play parochial football. By some odd coincidence, we were all big kids, which I think was mostly an evolutionary survival response to the fact that our nuns were the size of NFL linemen. The chief of police of the city of Denver decided we needed a football team, and he'd be the coach, no doubt thinking that he'd rather deal with us sooner than later. So we starved ourselves for a few weeks, spent our leisure time running up and down the school stairs in plastic bags, and we all made weight. Except for "Moose", who was even bigger than a nun.

This time, I think I'll skip the plastic bags and running stairs, thank you. And the starvation part doesn't seem to have the same appeal anymore either. Moving to another part of the country where the cuisine is less tempting (Nebraska comes to mind) has some merit, but it's not very practical. No, it's time to face the mirror and make all the hard, reasonable, long-term dietary decisions that need to be made for a 50 year old body, and somehow muster the fortitude to stick with them.

Switching to broccoli pizza, however, is not gonna happen.

The Knowledge of Youth

As for me, all I know is that I know nothing. ~ Socrates

There are a couple reigning stereotypes about the aging mind... or, at least, a couple that occur to me at the moment. One is that as we age, we gain wisdom. This is presumably due to the massive reference library of stupid moves that we've accumulated over the years, and which can be consulted on an as-needed basis. Mine, for example, rivals the Library of Congress at this point, and is still growing. The other is that we lose either our ability or interest in keeping up with all the changes around us - technological or otherwise - and gradually devolve into a blissful, functional illiteracy of sorts. I couldn't send a text message if my life depended on it, wouldn't know a Tivo if it hit me in the face, and do all my social networking by leaning over the backyard fence.

There is, however, another development that arises about this time in life - a nagging sense that you know nothing, and understand even less. It's not that you don't have facts and figures at your disposal from your years of education; it's that suddenly you realize you don't really "get it", as if a house of cards collapsed just as you were putting the last roof tile in place. I would say it's not a universal affliction, maybe not even common, but I am definitely not alone. Bill Bryson, in his wonderful book A Short History of Nearly Everything, described the moment when his cards collapsed:

Then much later - about four or five years ago - I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.

It's the Great Unraveling, and it leaves you (well, me) with a sense of desperation of sorts, as if you have to relearn everything and get it right this time. I've tried a couple of remedies (not counting Bill's book). On one hand, I thought perhaps this was some intrinsic failure of western thought, steeped in analysis and logic, and a more Zen-like outlook was needed.

The more you know, the less you understand. ~ Tao Te Ching

My other idea was to try to get to the bottom of things. The root of all knowledge in any subject. Want to understand people? Forget Freud - study chimpanzees (I do recommend this, by the way). Want to understand physical science? Forget... well, just forget it, because no matter which way you turn, you'll eventually fall off the cliff of quantum physics, where mind-altering drugs start to look increasingly attractive.

As it turns out, I think I can learn everything I need to know from my youngest son. He wakes, he plays, he works, he laughs, he cries, he tries, he fails, he wins, he learns, he reads, he eats, he sleeps. And he knows absolutely everything worth knowing.